This came across my desk recently and though it has nothing to do with Fluence, it does say something about how serious China is getting about its environment:
Richway Launches New Intelligent River Solutions with the Help of IBM’s Technology
Video Identification Enables River Chiefs to Achieve Effective River Governance
[September 19, 2017, Shanghai, China] With the pressing demands for water pollution prevention and control at present, high-tech means have always played a pioneering role. Richway announced today the signing of an agreement with IBM, under which Richway will launch exclusive image recognition products in the water affairs industry with the help of IBM’s technical capacity, so as to identify natural water bodies, floats, water quality, and fish species through machine modeling. In particular, its identification accuracy for fish species has exceeded 90% and has reached an internationally advanced level in methodology, technical architecture and design concept. In the meantime, this solution can be applied in such fields as industry and security, with wide application prospects.
With nearly 20 years of experience in water affairs, Richway Technology Group Co., Ltd. provides solutions, application software, system integration and monitoring products and services to water conservancy, water affairs, environmental protection, land and ocean, and other water-related fields; Its main customers are the government’s water information centers and water-related enterprises, such as the aquaculture industry.
For a long time, although Richway has invested to build a video system to reveal problems in water affairs for its customers, the video information has still required to be checked by workers; Furthermore, the video system features a low monitoring coverage and a high randomness, often omits high-risk sites, and fails to show accurate water depth and water quality changes in video images. In the meantime, the system cannot automatically give alarm to abnormalities, with an insufficient analysis on accumulated pictures and video data, a low data utilization rate and a low rate of return on investment. It is fair to say that the costly system has brought a great burden to the management unit, instead of values.
Image identification products could well solve this problem. With the help of IBM’s Visual insights solution, Richway's image identification products could provide defect classification-based learning for video images, while expanding algorithm and image data sets, in order to meet the demands for detecting new situations and identifying natural water bodies and relevant content. The specific functions include water surface line change identification, float identification, identification for illegal intrusion into water bodies, river water waste monitoring, black and odorous water body identification, and marine fish identification. In addition, it could also analyze relevant data, and give alarm for abnormalities.
According to Richway, with the help of IBM's technology strength, Richway’s image identification system breaks through traditional monitoring system means, and tackles the difficulties in the combination of image identification and water-related business by means of machine learning. Since being launched, the products have been implemented in many fields, such as the river chief system, flood control and disaster reduction, and marine water environment protection, in a bid to effectively solve such problems as multiple video sites and low utilization value. Besides, the image identification system boasts significant advantages in identification accuracy, computing performance, and business solutions, breaks through video manufacturers’ single product practice of fixed scenes, and could make the in-depth combination between images and business, and maximize the value.
According to IBM, the efforts in applying technology in the water affairs industry and helping Richway’s customers to monitor and prevent water pollution could not only contribute to the water area monitoring and governance, but also benefit local people. This is of important significance to current situations of water shortage and serious water pollution. IBM is willing to provide complete and improved water-related solutions to more relevant government departments and water-related enterprises, hand-in-hand with Richway.
In fact, it's not the first cooperation beween Richway and IBM. As early as in 2014, both parties established “Richway-IBM Joint Innovation Laboratory” to provide integrated solutions, products and services based on Internet of Things, big data analysis, and cloud computing technology in the fields of water conservancy, water affairs, and water environment. Moreover, the image identification products are their latest cooperation achievements, and meet the pressing demands of governments at all levels since the implementation of the river chief system.
The river chief system is an important initiative in river and lake governance in China, which appoints Party and government heads at all levels as “river chiefs” in charge of organizing and leading the management and protection works of corresponding rivers and lakes. Since the mayors take the first responsibility for the river and lake governance, it is urgent to solve effective flood warning, water pollution monitoring and prevention, water resource distribution analysis and other water-related problems by technical means. In fact, the cloud platform for water affairs launched by Richway is a data platform to solve these problems. Along with the launch and application of the image identification system, the water affairs platform has also become more intelligent, and the leap-forward development from data acquisition, data identification and analysis to early warning is realized, so that a series of problems in water pollution prevention and control and water resource utilization will be well solved.
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